“My ties with Fårö have several origins. The first was intuitive.
“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your internal imaginings of forms, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections. Security is here. Don’t ask why. Explanations are clumsy rationalisations with hindsight. In, for instance, your profession you look for simplification, proportion, exertion, relaxation, breathing. The Fårö landscape gives you a wealth of all that.”
Ingmar Bergman in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern
Ingmar Bergman first landed on the island of Fårö in 1960 when he was searching for a location for his new feature film, Through a glass darkly. He wasn’t very positive about the possibility of Fårö, dismissing the island although he had never set foot on it. Yet, reluctantly, he traveled there, unaware of how it would change his life forever.
“If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home; if one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight.”
Ingmar Bergman on Fårö
The human population of Fårö is around 500 and may be slightly outnumbered by sheep. The island is made completely of limestone rock. On its coasts stand raukar, or giant sea stone stacks, like sculptures magically washed up from the sea.
But there are fields and meadows too, abundant greenery and generous plants that the people of Fårö know intimately. Due to their remoteness, they have learned to survive together, using what is available to them on the island. Though there are pine trees a plenty, they grow more crooked, a little bent and out of shape, just like the Fårö people who are known for their beauty and friendliness, yet also their quirkiness.
The idea of finding one’s landscape is an interesting one and has kinda been haunting me lately. A couple of months ago, I posted about French film director Agnès Varda, who said:
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
Agnès Varda
Varda said that if we opened her up, we’d find a beach. I’ve been thinking about my own inner landscape lately. It’s definitely been changing throughout the years. So often when out in nature I can feel immediately at home, to the point where I’ve tried to find a reason for it. Like when I am surrounded by mountains. Even seeing mountains on the horizon can make me feel… calm… and free. As if it’s where I belong. And yet I neither grew up nor now live near mountains. Do I have ancestral roots there? Can I possibly trace my lineage to some mountainous place? Was I there as a young child? No, no and no. My mind cannot rationalize it. But my body can feel it.
And though my mind wants to dismiss the idea of an inner landscape, it actually does make sense when I remember that we are nature, that all of the elements of the universe exist in every cell of our being.
Consider some of the everyday phrases we use to describe how we’re doing – “I’m not feeling grounded” or “I’m putting down roots.” “I’ve been on fire lately” or “I’m feeling burnt out.” “I’m going with the flow” or “Just trying to keep my head above water.” “My head is in the clouds” or “I’m floating along” or maybe “flying high.” And the list goes on…. These common phrases reveal just how interconnected we are with the elements.
Related: Take our quiz to discover your element.
And for many people today whose lifestyles separate them from the elements, they can often feel displaced, in a state of dis-ease.
“Since my childhood I’ve felt rootless wherever I happen to have been. It was only when I first went to Fårö in 1960 and moved there 13 years ago that I felt at home somewhere in the world. That’s where my roots are, where I feel that I belong. When I’ve finished my work down here, or finished my work full stop, then I’ll go back there and become a Fårö man.”
Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film
But how does one find their own landscape? Is it really something intuitive as Bergman experienced?
I think of another inspiration of mine, Georgia O’Keeffe, who also talks a lot about her bodily responses to the New Mexico landscapes, feeling immediately at home.
When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It’s something that’s in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was born in a place so different than New Mexico – on a farm in Wisconsin, where she spent her childhood. Her early adult years were spent in big, bustling cities, including New York, for close to 2 decades. Instead of Bergman’s world of European theaters and cinemas, O’Keeffe’s world was made up of NYC museums and galleries. She briefly visited Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1917 while she and her sister were road-tripping between Colorado and Texas. Immediately she was struck. It took her 12 years to get back there, but then she returned very regularly for long months on her own before eventually making it her permanent home. She lived there for the rest of her life. Today I cannot separate Georgia O’Keeffe from New Mexico, not even in my mind.
I feel at home here – I feel quiet – my skin feels close to the earth when I walk out into the red hills.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Both Bergman and O’Keeffe spent a lot of time in their environment too. They grew and foraged, cooked and celebrated things from their environment. Listened and watched. Walked and ruminated. They were immersed in their place, fully present with all of their senses, contributing their own skills.
Bergman made several films and then also two documentaries, including a 3-hour documentary film that captures the people and daily life on Fårö. It is the greatest portrait of the island, with real life characters even better than the fictional ones Bergman often portrayed in his other film and theatre work. Perhaps it is due to Bergman’s knowledge of them, and his love.
“I cannot imagine my life and how it would have turned out had I not had Fårö.”
Ingmar Bergman in an interview, 2003
Bergman built his dream house on Fårö, just as O’Keeffe furiously renovated old adobe structures into her own modern paradise. Both had ideas about living and wanted their homes to blend perfectly into the landscape as if they were apart of it.
Just as Bergman spent years on the Fårö documentary, O’Keeffe created in her landscape as well, created out of it, with it. Some days she would leave her ranch at 7:00 and be out in the land until after 5:00. She was known to camp at times and use her Ford Model A as a traveling studio.
“The first year I was out here I began picking up bones because there were no flowers. I wanted to take something home, something to work on… When it was time to go home I felt as if I hadn’t even started on the country and I wondered what I could take home that I could continue what I felt about the country and I couldn’t think of anything to take home but a barrel of bones. So when I got home with my barrel of bones to Lake George I stayed up there quite a while that fall and painted them. That’s where I painted my first skulls, from this barrel of bones.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
Bones, stones and driftwood inspired her work. When she traveled back to New York, she shipped large barrels of bones there so she could continue to paint them and help her feel a bit more ‘at home.’
She also painted parts of her landscape, sometimes over and over again, each time understanding a new aspect of it. “I’ve traveled all over the world,” she once said, “and I don’t think there’s anything as good as this.”
The mountains of New Mexico, in particular, were among O’Keeffe’s favorite subjects to paint. There was one special mountain – the Cerro Pedernal, which was a unique, flat-topped mesa – that she was fascinated with. She referred to it as her mountain and joked that God promised he’d give it to her if she painted it enough. Which may sound egoistic at first, but actually, wouldn’t it be nice to have a place so incredibly dear to us that we came to know it as truly ours?
Not only did O’Keeffe paint the New Mexico landscape hundreds of times, but she also spent a lot of time outside, gardening, tending to the earth, cooking from scratch, pickling and preserving. Other than bones, she had a totally badass collection of stones too.
“I would rather come here than any place I know. It is a way of life for me to live very comfortably at the tail end of the earth so far away that hardly anyone will ever come to see me and I like it.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
Fårö is also remote. “Getting to the island, off the eastern coast of Sweden, takes a plane, a train or a bus, a car and two ferries. Which is exactly what made it so appealing to the reclusive Bergman,” wrote Dean C.K. Cox for The New York Times.
Georgia O’Keeffe has also been described as “reclusive,” notably by The New Yorker.
And interestingly, when Ingmar and Liv were building their home on the island of Fårö, they took an enormous amount of inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe, whose homes where not just places to live, but extensions of her creativity and work. She edified and cared for her home as if it were part of her body. Every single little detail mattered, just as it was with Bergman’s house as he worked with architect Kjell Abramson who built the Hammars home.
Though the two homes were set in drastically different landscapes – O’Keeffe’s being a desert, Bergman’s being a tiny island in the Baltic Sea – both were characterized by wide open spaces that feel “at the tail end of the earth.” Fårö is a tiny fragment of earth in the stark blue of sea and sky. Abiququ is a vast ochre landscape full of bones and mud, but also set under an enormous sky.
Both are, in their own way, timeless landscapes. Places where time doesn’t exist in the same way that others experience time.
Finding Your Landscape
So how do I, how do you, how do we come to understand our own inner landscape, our real home?
Is this sort of knowing only available to artists? Agnés Varda, who talked about her inner landscape, was also a highly creative film director.
Look at what author Jay Griffiths writes of artists in her book, Wild: An Elemental Journey…
“We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed though your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience.…
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey
And yet I know plenty of artists who are nomadic and often feel rootless, who are not reclusive at all. Not to mention all of us who don’t identify as artists and don’t have the same opportunities as O’Keeffe and Bergman did. What chance do we have to find “the one”?
The story of “love at first sight” doesn’t belong to us all
It’s a question I’ve been exploring for some time. But I’ve also come to understand that there are many ways to find one’s place in life.
Robin Wall Kimmerer often talks about “becoming indigenous to place” – an evocative phrase, but what does it mean and can it help us here in truly knowing what it means to belong?
For Kimmerer, being indigenous to place is less about place and more about skill. It doesn’t have to be something intuitive but something intentional. It is rooted in behaviors – in listening, observing, learning, respecting and contributing something of one’s own gift.
So then any of us who took the time and the care to learn about the natural world we’re a part of and to engage in practices that respect the integrity of our local ecosystems and communities can come to call it home and feel intricately, intimately as if we belong to it.
Certainly O’Keeffe and Bergman took the time and care, and they definitely contributed their gifts to the place as well. But also, their love for these places was immediate. It was not something that evolved. It was love at first sight, rather than love deepened over decades. Or was it both?
For most people, it is a process. Just as my marriage is. I didn’t know my husband was “the one” for a long time, until the moment I chose it actually. The story of ‘love at first sight’ doesn’t belong to all of us. In fact, the story of my marriage is one of hard work and commitment, deepening friendship and constant growth.
I could say a similar thing about Sweden, the place I have come to call home now. I wrote about this before, how it wasn’t until I was out in the forest one day with the wild Blueberries and stinging Nettles that I realized, it is this land and the plants I’ve come to know here that make it home. It is the place I’ve become naturalized to, hopefully in a non-invasive way, and it took me nearly a decade to truly and deeply know it as Home.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Ingmar Bergman inspire me with their wild spirits and full-hearted, full-bodied thrusts into their places, their willingness to create within it, and be re-created by it too.
Jay Griffiths reminds me of my animal nature, that intrinsic wildness that I cannot lose, cannot waste, for it is a guide.
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds me of my role in the process, that becoming rooted to this place is also up to me.
And until further notice, this is the place I call Home.
Today my city is so much more familiar and comfortable. I know the 14 islands of Stockholm like the back of my hand. Its shortcuts and scenic routes. I know where to find anything I need from the earth here. I have my secret places too. Not only do I know this place by sight, but also by scent and sound. I’m fully at home here now – in a way that I never, ever felt about the place I was born. We are non-indigenous yet deeply rooted inhabitants of this land and are trying our best to learn and follow its songlines, not found on any man-made map.
Though we are yearning for more nature and less city these days. My partner and I have been planning to move our family to the countryside, a couple of hours outside of Stockholm at least, and we are actively searching for where that place may be. Will we go north or south, or west perhaps? We are feeling a bit lost, changing our minds every few weeks it seems, which has felt so frustrating. When I just stop and breathe and meditate, what I get from the universe is a calm, Wait. All I can say for now is that when that if and when that “quick wild scent in the air” arises, I hope we will lift our heads to sniff and “know it unmistakably.”
I have a feeling there will be a wild sea coast nearby. Because that, I think, for now, is what we might find if we opened me up.
What landscape would we find if we opened you up? Do you know? And if so, how? When?
I wish you well on your journey.
Take care and stay Wyld!
xx
